Last week there were some minor setbacks in Indiana harvest because of rain but it didn’t keep farmers away for very long. Going into the weekend Dave Lowe, who farms in Jay County, said bean harvest wasn’t quite to the halfway point.
“I’m running beans right now and they’re 14.5%, ground conditions aren’t terrible but there’s a lot of beans over in this area to cut yet,” he said. “I would say we might be still be 40 percent, so a lot of beans to cut yet. Yields have been in the 40’s to the high 60’s on our farm. Our early beans got hurt bad but we’re thankful for what we’ve got. We even got some late hail and the field I’m running in now had 20 percent hail on it.”
But that field is still producing 41 bushels per acre. The hail came 4 weeks ago and Lowe said there were a lot of beans on the ground before he even got to the field. Corn yields so far are not quite up to what he expected.
“The moisture is in the mid to high 20’s what we’ve shelled. The yields are anywhere from 180 to 220 and we had a farm average last year of over 220.”
Lowe told HAT last year’s early season crop emergence was excellent but this year it was wet early, limiting the crop potential.
“And it stayed wet so that hurt us. We had to dribble on quite a bit of our nitrogen, probably about half. We did some studies a couple of years ago and late application is better than no application obviously, and that was proven. We’ll see what happens this year but I think part of was just the timing of that nitrogen application.”
Hoosier Ag Today brings you the latest from the fields across Indiana with Crop Watch – brought to you by Trupointe Cooperative and Winfield Solutions – now open in Milford.